The Trinitarian Context of Spirituality 147 charismatic dimension of the future Marians’ religious life, as if placing the institutional forms on the back burner. In addition to other realistic difficulties which the Founder speaks about, this was possibly one of the important reasons that it took so long for the religious life proper to the community to crystallize, transitioning from the hermitical state through a mixed form that allowed pastoral work, to becoming an Order of Clerics Regular, historically the last one in the Church. Also, there is no doubt that from the beginning of his founding activity, Saint Stanislaus Papczyński had exactly this form of the religious life in mind which our Congregation reached nearly 30 years after its founding.90 In Stanislaus’s experience of faith, one notices a conviction that the Holy Spirit constantly acts within the community that he founded. It is true not only for the moment of the Congregation’s emergence, but also for its future. And just as he himself was accompanied and guided by the Holy Spirit, so also his spiritual sons would be. It seems that this conviction was so firmly implanted in the Founder’s mind that he wanted to prove that only the Order members themselves could impede the Holy Spirit’s action in them. For this reason, in the Norma vitae, he insisted that the Marians invoke the Holy Spirit in all important moments, especially those that impact the community’s shape and quality of spiritual life. This particularly concerns elections to offices responsible for the Congregation: the Superior General, the Provincials, the Assistants, etc.91 The Founder’s views were further developed by the Statuta, which added to the list other events of the religious life requiring the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, such as: the discernment of a vocation by the novices, the completion of the annual retreat by “seminarians after professing their vows in order to preserve the Spirit and to become more firmly rooted in the Spirit and the observance 90 Cf. A. Pakuła, Un’esistenza offerta a Dio e alla Vergine Madre, in L’Osservatore Romano, 211(2007), p. 10. 91 NV, IX1. In addition to the cited fragment from Norma vitae, Papczyński expressed the same spiritual view on the events of the religious life in his, Apologia pro egressu e Scholi Piis, where he stated, among other things: “I had professed a public oath, in addition to the customary vow, that I would not accept any office of a Superior, unless I were elected by the Holy Spirit in secret voting.” in: Selected Writings, p. 879.
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